The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Demons get kinetic

Sethren, we have serious work
to do.

We have mastered
demons.We can juggle with them now, we
can spin them on our fingertips like iridescent gyroscopes no bigger
than a midge.

And we have covered
things.A thing is anything in front of
your eyes now. That ballpoint, that mug; and including animals,
insects, birds.And maybe people as
well. With people, we are in the zone of the
ethical.A dead horse is a thing.A dead human being?
But let us stay away from the edge.We have anatomised a needle.We know what a thing is, and how in the metaverse
it is an assembly of demons; while in the real world, it is a bounded material
existence.Think of a needle.
What's next?

DemonthingactconceptmappraxisCulture

Next up, act.Act.
Here
it becomes crucial to fully realise, not just "Yes yada yada yada", but actually
stabilise the concept, even though we haven’t dealt with concepts yet, that
body, brain and the E=mc2
universe are a continuum.
An act is a kinetic four dimensional
amplification of a sequence of demons.

In 2007 Heinrich and Bugnyar did an experiment
with Ravens.They put a raven on a perch
in a deep narrow cage.A bit of meat was
hung from the perch on the end of a piece of string too long for the bird to heave it up in one pull.The raven did nothing but look at
the meat for several minutes.Then it
reached as far down the string as it could with its beak, pulled up a loop, trapped the loop between its foot and the perch, reached down again with its beak, and pulled up the meat.

This looked like a
raven analysing a spatial situation, organising an act in the neural substrate, and then completing a kinetic four dimensional
amplification of a sequence of demons.What components of logic, rationality, foresight,
mechanical analytics, and general universal philosophy contributed to this act
are not our concern, sethren.

It did demonstrate
something.Ravens have an ideoverse, a
four dimensional space in the neural substrate where demons exist.Acts are not the exclusive preserve of Homo sapiens.

Here is another
thing ravens did, this time not an experiment, someone just watched them.

A couple used to
tether their large dog to a post in the yard when they went to work, with
enough space that the hound had a full circle to wander about in.They put its bowl of food on the edge of the
circle and drove off, except one day they just pretended to, and stayed and
watched.A pair of ravens flew
down.One stood on the edge of the
circle and cawed, danced and jeered.The dog naturally bounded over to kill it,
and was aggrieved to find that the rope pulled it up just short.A prancing raven and a rearing, fang-gnashing slathering hound.Meanwhile the
other raven ate its fill of dog food on the other side of the circle.Then the ravens swapped places.

Maybe, nothing to do with acts, but maybe when we search for the origins of human cooperation, we should have more regard for the behaviour of others in the animal kingdom; African hunting dogs, wolves, orca and porpoises, social falcons. The interactions of a pack of hunting dogs, from first waking to kill, has enough complexity to give us work for a while.

I wander off
again.I become embroiled.Let us rather, sethren, look at an act,
borrowing a pair of the excellent “Darwin’s goggles” from Jonnie Hughes.

It is the act
performed with a needle; not the needle we anatomised all those days ago, but a
needle in functional terms; a thing for puncturing a plane of material and
drawing a thread through it.

Okay, we are going
way back, to just the epoch before the first actual needle evolved.Two lads are sitting against a rock in the
sun.One has a needle, a rather hefty
and clunking thing, with a thin hide strip through the eye.He doesn’t call it a needle, he calls it a dirip (this is not the same dirip as the
quantum toy entangled with its twin a billion light-years away in a kids room
on the planet Xerk which we discussed a few weeks ago.The coincidence of names is just that, a
coincidence.You may think, that’s very
strange, but the universe is full of coincidences).

So he’s sitting
there with this dirip, which we would recognise as a needle, forcing it through
the square of hide on his lap, drawing the hide lace through after it, and then
repeating the action, time after time.

After watching for
several minutes, which do not yet exist, the other says, “Bro’, I been watching
you what you doing and I have to say it, Bro’ what you doing is teleologically
opaque to me.”

“I’m diripping, Bro’.”

“But why?”

“Because this
assemblage, the pointed rigid body, the flexible strip it draws after it, is a
dirip.Thus, I am

diripping.”

“Yea, Bro’, but all
you doing is making a series of holes in that hide.What’s the point, Bro’?”

“Bro’, you can’t
dirip without making holes in the hide.That’s what you doing when you diripping.”

What we have witnessed is an
act (repeated), a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of
demons.But it is an act that is very
unlikely to have ever taken place, because such a thing as a dirip, and such an act
as a single unit of diripping (which could in time evolve into 10whatever
you like acts of diripping, think all the sewing machine needles in the
world, all at full chat) could not have taken place without the evolution of countless
other acts preceding it, the act of joining two things together (which has eluded
our diripping lad) being just one of them. Sewing will not evolve before a whole series of things and acts and concepts have evolved. Just as a demon is a locus for alliances of demons (a needle), a thing can be the locus for a whole agglomeration of things (a bicycle), and an act is made up of a sequence of acts, most of them involving things (a root canal filling). Culture sometimes looks fractal. We cannot generalise until we have the detail.

Sethren, we must
eat. Same time tomorrow. We have to ask ourselves whether there can be non-kinetic acts. Among other things. But kinetic first. Have we signed the petition, sethren? It is a demand that one of the plump pink London tapeworms should put his money where his bothria are and live on £53 a week; week after week. That is one of the things we shall understand in time, sethren. Demeaning and destructive poverty is not a condition. It is a praxis. We may get there in the end.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.